


game, set

by renaissance



Series: Pynch Week 2016 [4]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sports, Journalism, M/M, Tennis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-16
Updated: 2016-08-16
Packaged: 2018-08-09 04:25:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7786672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renaissance/pseuds/renaissance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>
    <i>For next month’s issue Helen has him interviewing the tennis bad boy du jour, but Adam can already see a different angle for the story. Ronan Lynch isn’t all they make him out to be—probably—he’s sensitive and attuned to his game like nothing else. Ronan takes the point in spectacular fashion and lets out a shout of victory, and Adam finds himself cheering along with everyone else.</i>
  </p>
</blockquote><br/>Pynch Week day 4 – "Try me"
            </blockquote>





	game, set

**Author's Note:**

> I felt like I'd written too much canonverse stuff this week, so here's an AU! I definitely had a meet-cute in me that needed to be written, and today's prompt pulled me in that "I don't really know you but I want to test your limits" direction. Thank you once again to the marvellous Mandy for beta reading!

There’s that stereotype of the tennis bad boy, foul-mouthed and furious, dashing his racket against the ground when he loses a set, throwing the sort of tantrum that would get the cops on your case in public, but here is just par for the course.

Ronan Lynch, Adam realises, is not that stereotype.

Even from the far side of the court, Adam can see that Ronan isn’t any angrier than a clenched fist when his opponent takes a point. He just stiffens his shoulders and braces twice as hard for the force of the next serve—and when it gets close, his racket flies out in a graceful arc, sending the ball back with the sort of trajectory that makes Adam wish he’d stuck with physics in college. Instead, he went into journalism, and for all he’s been trying to break into science communication, he has a well-paid job writing big-name interviews for a lifestyle magazine.

For next month’s issue Helen has him interviewing the tennis bad boy _du jour_ , but Adam can already see a different angle for the story. Ronan Lynch isn’t all they make him out to be—probably—he’s sensitive and attuned to his game like nothing else. Ronan takes the point in spectacular fashion and lets out a shout of victory, and Adam finds himself cheering along with everyone else.

Here’s what he knows about Ronan Lynch: he grew up on a farm, he still plays mixed doubles with Blue Sargent even after that time they fought on camera, he’s a childhood friend of Helen’s little brother and that’s the only reason their magazine got the interview. Helen’s little brother, who goes only by his surname, is a college friend of Adam’s—so everything comes full circle. It’s only a matter of time before Adam would’ve run into him at some social occasion, the kind of event that leaves Adam feeling irreconcilably fake, but which is apparently good for _networking_ , and that wouldn’t have been a real meeting at all, would it?

They don’t meet at an event. They don’t even meet after the match. They meet right there, in the moment—Ronan serves, hits the ball with the kind of resonance that fills the stadium and it curves perfectly. Adam isn’t paying attention to see the miscalculation, the way the ball soars too high. His eyes are on Ronan, and he notices something’s wrong because Ronan takes a step back, and his racket slips from his grip.

Adam doesn’t notice that the ball has hit him square in the forehead until after it ricochets onto his lap, right into his open palms.

The world takes a moment to reorient—it’s all tilted slightly, but Adam doesn’t pass out, so he thinks that’s a good sign. He blinks, and when his eyes open again suddenly everything is loud, and some people are crowding around him, others are pushing them away, on-site paramedics are climbing through the stands, and then there’s an ice pack pressed to his forehead, and he feels a little more present.

“I’m fine—”

“Can we get a stretcher?” one of the paramedics calls.

“No, no, I’m fine,” Adam says. He hazards a touch of his forehead. There’s a lump forming. _Great_.

“It’s good that you’re talking,” the paramedic acknowledges, “but we still need to get this checked out. There’s an ambulance on its way.”

Adam is in no position to argue. He refuses the stretcher, but lets the paramedic support him down the stairs to the ambulance, where he rides in the back.

It’s not the first time he’s been to hospital. The waiting room has the same antiseptic smell he remembers, the same claustrophobic combination of crying children and stressed nurses. At least he’s not there for long. A doctor sees him quickly and proclaims it a minor head injury, and tells him he has to take it easy for the next week or so, and expect headaches. This is reassuring—Adam feels like his forehead’s going to burst every time he so much as looks anywhere except straight in front of him.

So as he’s leaving, he hears someone calling his name before he sees who it is. “Hey, uh, Parrish? Adam Parrish?”

Adam has to swivel his entire body to make eye contact with—with Ronan Lynch. He pauses. “Yeah. That’s me.”

“Sorry about,” Ronan says, “you know. Serving a ball into your face.”

“My face is fine,” Adam says, half-smiling, which is all he can manage without triggering another flash of pain. He likes to think it makes him look a little sarcastic. “It was just my forehead.”

“Still,” Ronan says. “I wanted to, uh, apologise. Earlier. But my brother said I had to finish the match.”

Adam tries to raise an eyebrow. It’s not a great success. “Your brother?”

“My manager,” Ronan says. “Also my brother. I had to finish for, like, some sponsorship shit. I don’t really get it. He said we can cover the ambulance, though, so don’t… anyway, I have to go back to the stadium. I’ve got an interview with some fucking journalist that I’m not allowed to miss, and—”

“I’m—” Adam laughs. “I’m the journalist.”

Ronan’s face contorts into the most expressive embarrassment Adam has ever had the pleasure of seeing. “Fuck. Sorry.”

“Well, you’re in luck,” Adam says. “I have to take it easy, so I don’t think we’ll be getting that interview done today. Maybe your manager can reschedule.”

“Yeah,” Ronan says. “I’ll talk to him about it. Hey, uh, you want a lift anywhere?”

Adam wants to say yes. He wants Ronan Lynch— _the_ Ronan Lynch—to drive him home, maybe walk him up to his flat, cook him dinner—

“No, that’s alright,” he says. After all, he’ll see Ronan again.

 

* * *

 

It takes two days for Adam to move his eyes again, a week for the headaches to stop, and two weeks before he can no longer convince Helen that he needs the time off. “I want you back in the office on Monday,” she says. “And then you can get the interview with Lynch out of the way.”

“It’s not too late for that?” Adam is good at catastrophising, giving up on things. He wasn’t giving up on meeting Ronan properly, but the interview started to seem less and less likely with every day he was couch-bound, half-focused on the Food Network and half on his laptop.

“We’ve had to push it back an issue and bring forward that Laumonier exposé,” Helen admits, “but Lynch is still keen on it. Which—well, he wasn’t half so enthused before he hit you in the face. I think he feels bad.”

Adam’s not so sure, but he’ll take it. He gets Ronan’s number from Gansey and texts first, because he’s not so sure if they’d be able to sustain a call after their first and only conversation went down like a whole flotilla of lead balloons.

He never gets a reply to his text. What he gets is an email from Declan Lynch, the manager-brother, saying that Ronan is free from his intensive training schedule on Friday evening, and he would be happy to meet with Adam then.

“What, does he not know how to text back?” Adam asks Gansey over his coffee break, on the phone while everyone’s out of the office.

“He _can_ text,” Gansey says, “he just… chooses not to, sometimes. I figured it was worth a shot.”

“Either way, his brother’s organising it all,” Adam says. “I feel like more of a marketing tool than a journalist.”

“Ronan won’t see you that way, if it’s any consolation,” Gansey says.

Adam sighs. He does know that. He looks back at Declan’s email, still sitting in the centre of his screen. So clinical. He remembers the rawness he saw in Ronan and wonders if they’re really brothers.

“Don’t lose heart!” Gansey says. “I think you two will get on just fine.”

 

* * *

 

They meet at a café near work. Ronan shows up in tattered jeans and a hoodie, looking less like a sporting superstar and more like a kid on his way to community service. He orders juice with more vegetables in it than fruit and slouches down in the chair across from Adam.

“So. Parrish.”

Absurdly, Adam finds himself saying “Lynch,” like they’re posh schoolboys staring each other down over a regatta, or lawn bowls, or whatever it is that posh schoolboys do. Adam wonders if Ronan went to a posh school.

“Is there, like, anything specific you want to ask me?” Ronan says. “Or are you just going to watch me drink?”

Adam reaches for his coffee, then pulls away, picking up his pacer and notebook instead. “What got you interested in tennis?”

For a moment Ronan just stares at him. Then, he puts down his juice. “Seriously? That’s it? You’re just gonna ask me the same questions as every other fucking journalist?”

“What, you’ve had a lot of interviews?” Adam asks. “I seem to recall being told that this is an _exclusive_.”

“Post-game press conferences,” Ronan says sullenly. “All I ever talk about is what got me interested in tennis.”

Adam hasn’t been out of college long enough to deal with this shit. His magazine is nice and reputable and he got the job on his own merit, not through his connections. He interviews nice people with cover-ready smiles and a polite arsenal of one-liners, and then he writes inoffensive articles about them.

But part of him really wants to let loose. He wants to ask Ronan what he’d do if he couldn’t play anymore, what all the lines in his tattoo mean, what he misses most about the place he grew up in.

Tapping his pacer against the rim of his coffee cup, he says, “I don’t think you want to talk about anything more serious, do you?”

Ronan grins. “Try me.”

Adam starts small. “So what’s the deal with the tattoo? Self-expression or rebellion?”

“Both.” Ronan shrugs. “I haven’t regretted it yet.”

“And the symbolism?” Adam asks.

This earns him his first stoic pause. “Just thought it looked nice,” Ronan says. Adam doesn’t know him well enough yet to tell whether it’s the truth, but he has his doubts.

They skim through Ronan’s childhood and teenage delinquency in limited detail and, for all his protests, Ronan seems to prefer answering the questions about tennis. Adam supposes that _is_ what he’s famous for, but it’s not what he cares about. It’s not the way Ronan’s tells start showing, the way he leans back when he doesn’t want to answer something, the way he folds his arms when he’s annoyed. If Adam can’t capture the _person_ , he can’t do anything with the past he’s given.

Ronan remains stubbornly opaque.

“I want to get to know you,” Adam says, “but we’re not there yet.”

“What, you think I’m fucking with you?” Ronan snaps, not quite smiling.

“I think you don’t know you’re fucking with me,” Adam says plainly. “I think it’s going to take more than one interview to make sense of you. To get something I can put in an article that people will actually want to read.”

Ronan lets out a laugh at that. “You think I’m boring?”

Adam presses his fingers to his temple. “Let’s go with that for now.”

“Well, shit,” Ronan says, “I don’t know what else I can do. Guess you’ll just have to write a boring article.”

“Very funny,” Adam says. “Why don’t we schedule another interview? We can go somewhere more interesting. Your choice.”

“My choice, huh,” Ronan muses. “I’ll have my _manager_ get in touch with you.”

It’s a start.

 

* * *

 

“We’re putting this one in the article,” Helen says, maximising a window on her screen.

The display shows a picture of two boys side-by-side, dressed up in white tennis gear and holding rackets. One is clearly Gansey, right down to the haircut and dorky glasses, so the other must be—

“That’s _Ronan_?”

He has a head full of dark brown curls in the photo, and such an open, innocent smile. It’s hard to reconcile this with the man who flicked a bit of miscellaneous vegetable juice in Adam’s face instead of answering a question about the pressures of playing a sport professionally. (Adam’s notes have a stain on them. He’s taking the juice as the answer, and putting that in the article.)

“That’s Ronan,” Helen confirms. “He was such a loud kid.”

Adam nods. It makes sense. Ronan is a loud person. He doesn’t talk much, but when he does it feels like every second word has a new profanity law drafted for it. The way he carries himself—that’s loud too. There’s a lot going on in that head of his. Adam wants to get to the bottom of it, and not just for his article.

He has another meeting with Ronan coming up on Sunday. This one was arranged by text. Ronan admitted to circumventing his brother’s micromanagement; some sort of acquiescence to Adam’s request to _understand_ him. In that sense, Adam isn’t sure if he can really call it a _meeting_. Perhaps _date_ would be more accurate, but that’s not a call Adam is ready to make.

Still, he’s learnt something: Ronan is Catholic, and he goes to church every Sunday morning. _I can only do the afternoon_ , his text reads. _Bring tennis clothes_.

Adam had laughed aloud at that. _Subtle_ , he’d thought. But he’ll do it. More than anything, his curiosity is getting to him. Tennis must be the one thing that grounds Ronan to a world he isn’t quite compatible with. If that’s what it takes to get the hang of him, then that’s what Adam will do.

There’s another level of interest, too—Adam remembers how he felt when he first saw Ronan on court, that kind of effortless, furious grace, that loose singlet, those low-slung shorts. Maybe he’s thinking it’ll be a _date_ too.

 

* * *

 

The full heat of the midday sun surrounds Adam like a thick fog as he makes his way to the tennis court. He has to take the bus—still can’t afford a car—and it becomes an oven, even with a sparse Sunday crowd. He thinks about all his enthusiasm for seeing Ronan in his natural habitat, and feels like the world’s biggest idiot. There’s no way he’s going to be able to play tennis. He’ll die.

Some masochistic streak allows him to square his shoulders, grit his teeth, and get through it. He’s rewarded by a genuine smile on Ronan’s face when they meet—not the smile Adam saw in that old photo, but more electric, challenging.

Adam rises to the bait.

“Give me a minute to get changed,” he says.

“You sure you’re ready to take me on?” Ronan teases. “I’m kind of a big deal.”

“Try me,” Adam says, and Ronan’s livewire smile widens, sends out sparks.

Once he’s changed, Adam pauses in the shade to stretch. He catches Ronan watching him, and it takes another minute or two (is he working up the courage?) before Ronan comes over to him, consternation written on his face.

“Parrish,” Ronan says. He doesn’t say anything else. His eyes slowly track downwards, and for the first time it hits Adam that this might be a date for both of them.

“Lynch,” Adam says. “Ready?”

“You know tennis players don’t dress like that in the 21st century, right?” Ronan shoots back. “The white twinset. The matching headband. It’s a bit… I don’t know. Fucking twee.”

“Thanks for the compliment,” Adam says, rolling his eyes. “But what the hell else am I meant to wear in summer? I’d melt in black.”

Not for the first time, Adam wonders if Ronan’s precision black singlet is a sponsorship thing too. How much of it is style, and how much of it is comfort? How much of the Ronan Lynch that people see is the real thing?

Ronan shrugs it off. “Whatever. Ready to get your ass kicked?”

“Of course not,” Adam says. He tugs at the neckline of the white polo shirt he borrowed from Gansey, fanning himself.

“I’ll make it easier for you,” Ronan says. “You can have your back to the sun.”

“Small mercies in the middle of the day,” Adam says, but he takes the concession, and steps out on court. Just by the net, he stops, and he’s gratified that Ronan does too, standing a bit too close. “Let’s make this interesting.”

Ronan’s neutral expression twitches interested—a split-second motion, but Adam catches it. “Yeah?”

“If I manage to get a point off you, you have to tell me something about yourself that no-one else knows,” Adam says. “Something new for each point.”

“I’m not letting you publish my secrets,” Ronan says, like that’s the end of the matter.

“And I’m not saying I’ll publish it,” Adam counters.

There’s a beat of silence where Ronan doesn’t say anything, just looks at Adam with his eyebrows furrowed. Then he says, “Yeah, okay. One condition.”

Without thinking about it, Adam says, “Sure.”

“For each point I get off you,” Ronan says, “you tell _me_ a secret.”

Before the match has even started, Adam is outplayed.

 

* * *

 

They play until their shadows are long on the court. Adam enjoys it more than he thought he would—there’s sweat running down his skin as though he’s a rock at the foot of a waterfall, and his arms are sore beyond belief, but he feels _accomplished_ , and he likes that feeling more than he hates—used to hate—exercise.

There’s the exercise, and there are the secrets. Adam gets three points off Ronan, three out of a few too many, and one was only because Ronan hit the ball out of the court, over the wire fence and into the retirement home next door to the sports centre. Three points, and three secrets: that Ronan found his father dead when he was fifteen (not a secret) and locked himself in his room and cried for three days straight (a secret), got his tattoo for $900 (not a secret) because otherwise he might’ve done something worse to his body (a secret), and that he stopped playing tennis for two years (not a secret) because he felt like he’d never do anything worthwhile again (a secret).

Adam thinks he understands now.

He gives as good as he gets. Not with his tennis arm, but he can trade in secrets—of those, he has plenty. It’s an unorthodox interview, but then, Ronan isn’t his usual subject.

“You alright?”

When Adam looks up, Ronan is standing over him, his face caught in shadow. “Fucking exhausted,” Adam says.

Ronan grunts. “Need a lift home?”

It was only a month ago that they met, and Ronan offered him a lift home from the hospital. This time, Adam says, “Yeah.” He purses his lips. “You can come up for dinner, if you want.”

“Not gonna give me time to change into something respectable?”

“You don’t have to look good for my messy apartment,” Adam says, “I promise. Unless you’re implying that this is—”

He catches himself before he can say what they’re probably both thinking: _a date_.

“I’m not,” Ronan says. “I mean, I am, but—don’t put that in your article.”

Adam laughs, lets himself relax. “Yeah. I won’t.”

 

* * *

 

What makes it into the article is all of Adam’s embarrassing gushing about how much he loves watching Ronan play tennis, dressed up as literate flair. It’s a bit of Ronan’s past, but mostly Ronan’s present, all the ins and outs of his profession, all the details that Adam hasn’t heard anywhere else. It’s the anecdote of how they met, because Adam can’t resist.

What doesn’t make it in is the night they spend at Adam’s flat, reeking of sweat and take-out Chinese and up talking until well past midnight; and the next night, when Ronan proves that really, the only thing stopping him from using his phone is laziness; and the week between those nights and Adam’s deadline, when he spends every free second thinking about Ronan to the point that he can’t pass it off as just attraction anymore.

And the night after the deadline, when Adam doesn’t need to worry about any undue influence on his journalistic integrity, and he kisses Ronan like it’s their next big secret. He thinks that if Ronan keeps being as famous as he is, that might make it to press before the article.

**Author's Note:**

> If a minor head injury is good for anything it's informed medical accuracy in fic, although thankfully I didn't have to go to hospital for that one, haha;;
> 
> Leave a comment/yell with me about tennis Ronan!


End file.
